Many home or office electrical appliances or embedded devices (e.g. thermostats, refrigerators, ovens, alarms, etc.) could be enhanced by a connection to the Internet through which these appliances could be updated, monitored and/or controlled remotely. It has been suggested that such remote access could occur through existing Internet or World Wide Web (WWW) services, such as email, SMS (Short Message Service), Facebook, Twitter, etc. For the electrical appliances to communicate through these services, the various protocols used by these services must be programmed into the electrical appliances. To enable these capabilities, such feature-rich electrical appliances must have relatively large microprocessors with sufficient memory resources to host the various required software and networking services.
Many of these types of electrical appliances have already been developed with microprocessors, memory and other components for controlling the general functions of these appliances without the addition of any networking or external communication capability. These components have, thus, become common core components of such appliances. These components, however, are relatively small and under-powered for the more resource-intensive activities required to adequately handle the types of Internet and WWW services that the appliance manufacturers expect their customers to want in network-capable electrical appliances. It is necessary, therefore, for the appliance manufacturers to undertake a significant redesign of the core components of their electrical appliances in order to add the networking or external communication capability. There is, thus, a trend to increase the internal complexity (greater feature-richness) of many types of electrical appliances. Such increased complexity and redesign efforts often delay the introduction of a new product into the market. Additionally, both the redesign work and the larger more powerful components generally increase the overall cost and size of the electrical appliances, which consumers often prefer to be relatively small and cheap.
Furthermore, since new Internet and WWW services are occasionally developed, customers will expect their existing network-capable appliances to be able to work with the new services, even though the new services may not have even existed when the customers bought the various appliances. Network-capable appliances, therefore, must also have an upgrading or updating capability by which new protocols for the new Internet and WWW services can be added to the appliances after the appliances have been sold into the market and installed in customers' homes or offices. Such upgradability adds an additional layer of complexity and cost to the electrical appliances.
Additionally, a significant degree of uncertainty accompanies such capabilities, since the appliance manufacturers cannot reasonably anticipate all of the new Internet and WWW services that could come into existence after the appliances have entered the marketplace. It is necessary, therefore, for the manufacturers to overdesign the appliances in order to ensure that the appliances can be fully upgraded to the satisfaction of their customers for the reasonably expected lifetime of the product. Otherwise, the appliances will have limited flexibility to support new protocols emerging on the Internet or WWW.